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This has been tried already right?: if I move all livestock to another tank and get new live rock, sand, and water, will that work? And put all livestock back in?
I gave my anemone to my lfs cause he kept moving around when I got Dino's. I told him about my Dino problem but he wasn't concerned cause he said it's the systems problem and wouldn't spread to his. That was two months ago
But I seem to remember someone trying this and they came back

I should point out that I have drained some of my skimmer cup into a 12 oz water bottle and have been pouring a little bit of it every few days.

I also added 3 new fish about two weeks ago to increase my bioload - so far so good with them.

Also I've rebuilt most of my cleanup crew and so far only one snail death.

I have what appears to be diatoms and early stages of green algae all over my glass, frag racks and skeletal remains of corals were tissue is missing. Even on corals that are still alive.

Last but not least, many of my corals have started coloring up.

Your results are very promising IMO, I believe the green algae actually out competes the dinos for space, my diatom bloom lasted about 5 weeks which was longer than when I originally cycled my tank.
I am 10 weeks dino free, dirty method, Ostreopsis Ovata.

Your results are very promising IMO, I believe the green algae actually out competes the dinos for space, my diatom bloom lasted about 5 weeks which was longer than when I originally cycled my tank.
I am 10 weeks dino free, dirty method, Ostreopsis Ovata.

Thanks I'm actually shocked to see a difference in my corals already.

You know what that's a great point about the diatoms lasting so long . Usually durong a cycle diatoms only lasts a week or so. Normally when I've cycled a tank it switches from diatoms to green algae in a week or two.

I have read a lot on this thread and am battling dinos myself. It seems that there isn't much to do about this pest. If anything has worked for you? Do you mind sharing your thoughts for me please. I am at the last straw before I tear my tank down.

I have read a lot on this thread and am battling dinos myself. It seems that there isn't much to do about this pest. If anything has worked for you? Do you mind sharing your thoughts for me please. I am at the last straw before I tear my tank down.

Quick reply, as this computer is ridiculously outdated and the keyboard is how-you-say..fubared.

@ Cygnis: Interesting papers! 2 quotes:

Therefore, in MIRs and MCRs of the predators on MTDs,
the general sequence was copepods > large ciliates = the
larvae of benthos > small ciliates = HTDs.

Therefore, each MTD may have a different
ecological niche from that of other MTD species. These
different ecological niches..

-end quote

-People adding copepods are probably doing the right thing. They are the most efficient predator on dinos.
-Most (if not all) dinos are actually mixotrophic and can probably switch modes under stress like the aquarist turning the lights off
-Ostreopsis cysts can survive for 6 months! That is worse than ich
-Different species of dinos may occupy different ecological niches, so interventions may be targeting the wrong thing
-Many dinos feed on heterotrophic bacteria. (and cyano) But they also mention bacterial predation on dinos, especially Ostr cysts.

I also had the impression Montireef was saving skimmate in a separate bottle. Whoops! I did wonder about temperature.

Sand bed- I am away from my books but I am sure an Authority (Calfo or Fenner in Reef Inverts possibly) said dsb wouldnot work in a tank under 2 square feet. I originally decided against trying it because I do not have access to real live sand or detrivore kits or really good live rock and just dumping dry sand does not a dsb make. Thus the non dsb friendly livestock. Nobody local has a dsb (or they are keeping it a secret) Trend here is very very much Berlin style, ulns, biopellets type systems.

-The bacterial clumping is worrying. I have only euphyllia frags and a rock flower anemone in the tank; they should actually enjoy a bacterial snowstorm. Bristle worms are being lazy, they should be cleaning it up for me!

Eutrophication is actually my goal-many infauna have direct reproduction. Flatworms are the harmless acoel type, not planaria. Hydroids are jellies yes but not too worried about them. I am trying to reproduce what happens during the initial cycle without actually boosting ammonia. I hope to see a sucession of organisms, putting dinos in their place. I have undetectable N and P STILL.

I am feeding 5mL of phyto and 5 NLS teeny pellets daily, and a third frozen mysis weekly to the anemone.

This has been tried already right?: if I move all livestock to another tank and get new live rock, sand, and water, will that work? And put all livestock back in?
I gave my anemone to my lfs cause he kept moving around when I got Dino's. I told him about my Dino problem but he wasn't concerned cause he said it's the systems problem and wouldn't spread to his. That was two months ago
But I seem to remember someone trying this and they came back

If you do this, I would wait until your new system is very very well established. And not ulns, either. Some dinos can infect fish, and some make cysts which could travel in on an invert or coral. I suspect coral dips do not kill dinos.

I have read a lot on this thread and am battling dinos myself. It seems that there isn't much to do about this pest. If anything has worked for you? Do you mind sharing your thoughts for me please. I am at the last straw before I tear my tank down.

Sorry for the long post but...
First let me say I used algaeX to try to rid my bubble algae, HUGE mistake, it TOTALLY DECIMATED my micro fauna and brought on my dinos.
My params were stable, ca 420, alk 9 dkh, mag 1350, po4 and no3 undetectable.
Still have some bubble algae.
In the early days when infestation was heavy, I blew off corals and rocks daily and siphoned the sand bed through a 100 micron filter sock, ceased water changes, doubled my carbon, slowly raised alk to 12dkh, ran a turbo twist 12 36w uv (200 gal system) ran 100 uM socks on drains, supplemented bacteria(not sure if it helped), did 4 days lights out(did not help)did 4 days lights out and dosed h2o2 1ml/10g (did not help), reduced photo period(did not help), Skimmed heavy and wet, got a microscope and id'ed my dinos as Ostreopsis Ovata.
After @ 4 months and lots of research, I got 10uM filter socks for drains(ostreopsis @ 40uM), started siphoning sand and pumping water back in through a 5uM sediment filter, slowly put my photo period back to normal, stopped dosing bacteria(couldn't tell if it helped or hindered).
Was still blowing of rocks every couple days which by now was just a brown film that did not blow off well but could be wiped off, but corals were not really affected, mostly sand bed and brown film on glass that needed to be cleaned every few days.
After about 8 months, totally discouraged thinking I can't even give my livestock away with contaminating someone else system I stood over my sump in the next room with a bottle of bleach and contemplated getting out of the hobby for good.
I'm glad that I didn't do it.
After about 8 months I decided that since it likes the sand so much then the sand must go, I sucked it out over a 2 week period still filtering the water and still no water changes, I noticed that ca, alk and mag were rising all the time and by now I was dosing less than half as much alk, less than a quarter as much ca and had stopped dosing mag.
Continued blowing the rocks every other day and was having to clean the brown film on the glass daily.
The film on the sand and rocks was mainly dinos but the film on the glass was mainly diatoms with dinos.
My coraline algae was receding all the time.
I now decided I needed to rebuild my micro fauna as there was not so much as a single pod to be found. I decided to go "dirty" like the tank would have been when I first cycled it with real live rock and no shortage of diversity.
I shut off the uv, skimmer, gfo, carbon. Got 1200 amphipods pods from reef2go, got pods and phyto from the algae barn, copepods from get your pods, got crabs, snails, pods and pods+ from reef cleaners, got brittle stars, amphipods, spaghetti worms, bristle worms and sand activator Indo pacific sea farms.
I got phyto cultures from florida aqua farms and started culturing phyto, I got copepods from live aquaria and started culturing them, and I started culturing amphipods.
In the beginning there was attrition, I saw dead amphipods floating through the water column and lost some snails and crabs but don't know if it was the dinos. I started dosing phyto 200ml 4x a day. After about 3 weeks of no skimmer, carbon, gfo, uv, and feeding a little heavier green micro algae started to appear on the glass(still mostly brown but they did not occupy the same space) and hair algae on the back glass(which I let go for about a week then scraped off) and cyano on rocks and bottom, and now po4 @ .03 and no3 @ 3, I restarted my skimmer, started 1/2 carbon, started dosing lanthanum chloride to control po4 and dug my sulfur denitrator out of storage to control no3.
I continued this way for a few weeks and the brown film receded from the rocks and coraline algae started to grow, green micro algae had taken over the glass completely and was growing a crop daily, cyano was growing mats which I controlled by sucking it up with a turkey baster but always left some.
It's now about 6 to 8 weeks since I went dirty(should have kept a better log) and there are no signs of dinos, I decided to chemiclean the cyano away as per instructions.
Started doing regular water changes again and deemed myself dino free the first week of June.
Slowly installed a new sand bed (caribsea seafloor special) and lowered my alk back to 9 dkh, have been increasing my dosing and am back to pre dino levels.
Got some film showing up on new sand but only diatoms and algae present, I cut back the phyto to 100ml 4x a day.
Diatom bloom lasted about 6 weeks, coraline algae growing like a champ.
Tank looks beautiful and livestock well, still dosing copepods and amphipods from my cultures and running normal amount of carbon.
Po4 did increase from phyto to .05 but am slowly bringing it back down to .03, no3 is 4 ppm.
The diverse micro fauna/plankton was the key but the phytoplankton was the nail in the coffin IMO.

Here in Iceland are less than 50 reefers and I've heard none of them is able to keeps SPS healthy and they tend to end up dead.
From the photos they post it looks like almost all of them have dinos. The LFS included.
They are in denial or don't have a clue about what is going on. Same goes for the rest of the reefers in the world so it's normal.

There is only one exception, a reef on the opposite of the scale. An outgrown SPS tank where unicorns and rainbows live.
I imported seeded live rock from that tank earlier this year without success.

Quote:

Originally Posted by karimwassef

So I think it is not a magical 'thing' in his system. It is his system.

Quote:

Originally Posted by karimwassef

Things I would stay away from...
Any heavy duty phosphate removers like Lanthanum Chloride.
Mixed on GFO- I'd take it offline.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Montireef

After 6 months dealing with ostreopsis and amphidinium, here are my findings:
...
- They can be easily triggered by a drop in PO4, specially when rapid.
...
I have no doubt as well that the use of PO4 resins like Phosguard are one of the triggering factors when talking about dino blooms. Every time I have used it I have noticed an increase in ostreopsis and amphidinum.

Quote:

11/24/2014, 06:15 PM #449
LelandF.
Ive been in this hobby a very long time, and I honestly can't remember many people having problems with, or having dinoflagellates at all in the past. What has changed to allow dinoflagellates to thrive in our tanks? GFO was not used then, and I'm wondering if using too much GFO and having ultra low nutrient levels in our tanks are giving the dinos everything they need to thrive, since there seems to be a very common problem with them in the last 10 years.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 34cygni

Trends in the hobby seem to have converged to create systems that are tailor-made for dinos: ULN is their preferred competitive environment, we're providing what is probably the ideal sort of sand for organisms that love sand, and then we fill the sand up with detritus and bacteria. If you build it, they will come.

So what do we do about this?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quiet_Ivy

-People adding copepods are probably doing the right thing. They are the most efficient predator on dinos.
...
Eutrophication is actually my goal-many infauna have direct reproduction. Flatworms are the harmless acoel type, not planaria. Hydroids are jellies yes but not too worried about them. I am trying to reproduce what happens during the initial cycle without actually boosting ammonia. I hope to see a sucession of organisms, putting dinos in their place. I have undetectable N and P STILL.

Quote:

04/14/2015, 01:29 PM #948
Montireef

I still have some ostreopsis visible only the microscope. I am fostering further biodiversity and getting a lot of micro critters by dosing big amounts of phytoplankton and aminoacids (copepods, snails, amphipods, tube-worms...). I dose 100 ml phytoplankton per day (nanochloropsis, Isochrysis and tetraselmis) with a peristaltic pumps in a very linear way (a squirt every hour).

The first days I got a little spike of dino-snot but now it seems to have come to a balanced situation and ostreopsis is clearly vanishing even in full sun light and doing WC.

Never got better results and so easily. I bet it is a matter of time to fully get rid of this pest.

04/20/2015, 02:11 PM #968
Montireef

Quote:
Originally Posted by yeldarbj
If you want a permanent solution, then I'd suggest nutrients, nutrients, nutrients. I've been skimmerless for 10 months now and dino free (ostreospsis) for 8 months. I run a small home made algae turf scrubber for filtration and have a full sps tank. Algae is your friend and the dino's enemy.

I agree, if I switch on my skimmer I get a dino bloom a few days later.
Now I am dosing KNO3 and everything looks better. I have no algae anyway, not even the smallest one, they just don't thrive although my big tank (600 gal) sits in the sun (it is outside the house).

04/22/2015, 01:41 AM #975
Montireef

After 6 months dealing with ostreopsis and amphidinium, here are my findings:

- Some dinos are almost always in our tanks, they just don't thrive (amphidinum). Others are caught.
- They can be easily triggered by a drop in PO4, specially when rapid.
- The best way to deal and get rid of them is competition. Foster other forms of life, specially algae that needs some PO4 to thrive. If you are lucky you can get other kind of dinoflagellates like oxyhrris marina and beat them very fast.
- Some kind of them form cysts and therefore are really difficult to get rid of. They can disappear for months and suddenly show up again if conditions are favorable.
- Stong flows help them spread and make the problem worse.
- Nutrient depletion slow them down but won't help on the long run. It is better to foul the water slowly increasing feedings and stopping waterchanges, this is food for dinos, but also for competitors that eventually will suffocate them.

As an example of this I am succesfully getting rid of ostreopsis by dosing large amounts of phytoplankton. No algae at all and water is pristine; NO3 and PO4 are still undetectable but high enough to permit other forms of life like copepods, worms, amphipods...

05/01/2015, 05:05 AM #1014
Montireef

I am sure now.
After six months and five ostreopsis blooms the best strategy to fight these dinos is just foster other living forms.

A month ago I started dosing phytoplankton gel on a 120 ml/day basis (split in 24 doses with a peristaltic pump to avoid nutrient peaks and maintain a constant amount over time). Two weeks later I started to see thousands of pods, little snails, worms...and no algae at all. NO3 and PO4 tests keep at undetectable levels thought the heavy phytoplankton feeding (because all the new critters keep up with it and nothing is being accumulated). These pods and snails ate ostreopsis clumps like crazy and now my 600 gal system is dino and algae free, thousands of copepods, red planaria, collonista snails...even trochus snails are breeding (I have seen some baby trochus).

Other thing that helped me a lot was switching off the skimmer.

I have no doubt as well that the use of PO4 resins like Phosguard are one of the triggering factors when talking about dino blooms. Every time I have used it I have noticed an increase in ostreopsis and amphidinum.

My tanks sit in the sun, in Spain. I was concerned about the increase of light and rise of temperatures now in spring time. But I still don't see any dinoflagellates anywhere.

I will keep dosing phytoplankton but I will lower down the dose to 80 ml/day

Quote:

Originally Posted by cal_stir

Po4 did increase from phyto to .05 but am slowly bringing it back down to .03, no3 is 4 ppm.
The diverse micro fauna/plankton was the key but the phytoplankton was the nail in the coffin IMO.

Meanwhile...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quiet_Ivy

Trend here is very very much Berlin style, ulns, biopellets type systems.

Quelle surprise.

I know you guys started out looking for a fix for dinos, but has it occurred to any of you that you've basically concluded that ULNS reefing is a dead end?

-People adding copepods are probably doing the right thing. They are the most efficient predator on dinos.

And you can't argue with success. But rather than culturing and dosing pods, in the long run wouldn't it be easier to build the capacity for generating pods into our systems? If biodiversity is the fix for dinos, we should be considering how to make our systems naturally more biodiverse, and since biodiversity is known to correlate with habitat diversity... Fuges, cryptic zones, Shimek-compliant RDSBs, even waterfall algae scrubbers are pod generators -- we have multiple ways to do this and at least one should be probably be incorporated into any system.

And corals eat pods, so this looks killing two really big, colorful birds with one stone.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quiet_Ivy

-Most (if not all) dinos are actually mixotrophic and can probably switch modes under stress like the aquarist turning the lights off

Yes, this is something I avoided bringing up for fear of making my posts even longer. Scientists used to think some dinos were hetetrotrophs, some were mixos, and some were autos, but literally dozens of species believed to be autotrophs have been shown to be mixotrophic in the last 20 years, and now the consensus is that there's probably no such thing as an obligate photoautotrophic dinoflagellate, though of course it's a big ocean and one may yet turn up. And some hobbyists have reported success with blackouts -- it doesn't work with ostis, but other species may be more dependent on the autotrophic part of their metabolisms than they are -- so I didn't want to open that can of worms.

A lot of heterotrophic dinos have shown the ability to acquire plastids (the organelles in a cell where photosynthesis happens) from several different kinds of algae. But it's incorrect to say that all dinos are mixotrophic because of this -- heterotrophic species that evolved from mixotrophic dinos are known to be biologically unusual because they've jettisoned their plastids entirely (though as noted, they sometimes steal new ones from their prey). AFAIK, no other organism is known to have done this. Instead, the normal evolutionary path is for ex-mixotrophs to retain the tiny, withered, sometimes very difficult to identify remains of their plastids because they've been repurposed to serve some other biological function.

In any case, heterotrophic dinos that have acquired plastids are not truly mixotrophic. They're using the plastids to generate sugar to feed their still fully heterotropic metabolisms. As you said, they can switch modes under stress -- when food is scarce, acquiring plastids would be a logical survival strategy for a heterotrophic dino. When food is plentiful, they can eject or digest the plastids to save themselves the metabolic cost of maintaining them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quiet_Ivy

-Ostreopsis cysts can survive for 6 months! That is worse than ich

Glad you reported that and not me... I didn't want to be responsible for putting the idea out there that once you're past the six month mark, you're done with ostis. It's too good to be true.

That O. ovata doesn't make resting cysts capable of hatching and triggering a bloom years later seems like wishful thinking. Maybe it's true -- I hope so! -- but I wouldn't want to wager on it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quiet_Ivy

-Different species of dinos may occupy different ecological niches, so interventions may be targeting the wrong thing

Dinos have three known strategies for eating stuff: some of them ingest food, which limits their diet to stuff small enough to fit in their "mouths"; some of them have a sort of membrane that they exude and use to engulf prey larger than themselves, trapping prey organisms inside what amounts to an external stomach that fills up with digestive enzymes and dissolves them; and some of them jab a feeding tube into their prey and suck out their insides (some of these dinos are parasitic and can even attach themselves to fish).

The risk of losing their cysts is doubtless another reason ostis use their toxins to prevent the growth of unwanted bacteria. I would wager that their preferred food bacteria rarely, if ever, attack their cysts, at least not while they're protected by a coat of mucilage.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cal_stir

After about 8 months, totally discouraged thinking I can't even give my livestock away with contaminating someone else system I stood over my sump in the next room with a bottle of bleach and contemplated getting out of the hobby for good.
I'm glad that I didn't do it

Dude -- I suspect the entire hobby is glad you didn't do it. They just don't know it yet.

Corals keep their symbionts nitrogen-limited to force them to pump out sugar, and as much as half of this sugar goes towards making mucous -- which sounds a little disgusting until you consider that mucous is the front line of coral's immune system. They secrete mucous to lift bacteria off their surface, and then release the mucous into the water, and the bacteria drift harmlessly away.

I can't edit that post, so here's a correction in the interest of accuracy:

Corals keep their symbionts nitrogen-limited to force them to pump out sugar, and as much as half of this sugar goes towards making mucous -- which sounds a little disgusting until you consider that mucous is the front line of coral's immune system. They secrete mucous to lift bacteria off their surface, and the coral polyps (or sometimes the CUC) will eat the mucous to ingest the bacteria. If a coral is under serious threat, it can detach the mucous in hopes that the pathogenic bacteria will drift harmlessly away.

It was never my intention to be ULN, I inadvertently got there trying to get rid of bubble algae, it seems that most hobbyists these days believe po4 and no3 should be 0 and strive for that. I guess I got caught in it because whenever you talk algae you talk about too much nutrients and when you talk about too much nutrients you talk about po4 and no3.
The bubble algae I have left is slowly receding and my po4 .05 and no3 4 ppm, I attribute that to me carefully siphoning it out without breaking the bubbles and releasing the spores.
I wonder if the plankton is helping with the bubble algae, it could be feeding on the spores.
My goal is to maintain po4 @ .03 and no3 @ 1 to 2 ppm.

Pods eat dinos, but we need bacteria to eat their cysts -- perhaps that's the key to Montireef's and cal_stir's success stories.

I've never seen pods munching on my dinos, but there are plenty of them on the glass, eating green algae.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 34cygni

So what do we do about this?

Meanwhile...

Quelle surprise.
I know you guys started out looking for a fix for dinos, but has it occurred to any of you that you've basically concluded that ULNS reefing is a dead end?

So what is the reason for the apparent increase in donflagellates?

Dinos are stealthy and most of the time go unnoticed or are mistaken for diatoms.
My tank is very well documented with photographs so I can trace it's history back to 2001.
I first got dinos more than 10 years ago, but didn't have a clue back then.
One of the reasons could be that reefers are more aware of them now.

Live rock requires Cites permit now for importing.
The 80 pounds (40kg) I received a few weeks ago was so close to sterile I wonder if it's handled differntly now in order to make sure nothing illegal gets to hitchhike all the way to our reef tanks.
After more than 30 hours out of water it didn't have any smell to it. There was nothing dead to make any sort of smell.
After two hours searching I found a single grab, some purple coralline and algae that could fit on a stamp.
I watched my Copperband Butterfly spend 10 minutes on it not finding anything to pick on. You can't argue with the pros.
What I'm saying is that live rock may have poor bio diversity compared to what it used to.

ULNS may make a reef tank more susceptible for dinos, but we have not proven jet that increased micro fauna is the solution for dino problems.

Yesterday morning I started to add the content of my skimmer back to the tank after having sat there for a week.
I drained the wet part from the skimmer in 3 doses 3 hours apart to make sure it was not too much of a shock to the fish.
I can't say I like the smell of sulfur in the morning, but it didn't seem to have any effect on the fishes.

The skimmer was turned off and the water turned slightly less transparent with the 0.4gallon (1.5 litres) of skimate back in there.
I scraped the glass as well to add to the mix and added a bag of GAC to a high flow area.

Last night the dinos took off the sand bed for their nightly swim in the water column and today right after the lights come on they all returned so it looks identical to how it did yesterday.

If something happens in the next few days or not, you will be the first to know.

Some years ago I added new live rock and got about 3 months of good coral growth.
That was when I had no SPS coral growth, but was unaware of the effect that dinos have on coral health.

Last year I added live rock, reducing the dino population dramatically and there was an instant turn in coral health.

This year I add live rock, the dino numbers stay as before, but there is a big change in coral health.
SPS corals that have had zero growth for over half a year, suddenly start to grow and show some color.

This time there was no visible change for a week, so I added dead shrimps to raise nitrates.
That is the only other parameter change at the time. Anyone can give this a try with minimal effort.

Given my history of adding live rock while blooming dinos are ruling a tank, this can't be a coincidence.
Since the dinos stayed in place and there is nothing eating them or reducing their numbers it's not pods that are doing the trick.

I find it most likely that bacteria is reducing the toxic levels.
I think this is one of the keys on understanding how dinoflagellates affect coral health.